How Puerto Rico Became White: An Analysis of Racial Statistics in the 1910 and 1920 Censuses

The gradual “whitening” of Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century is often noted in scholarly, journalistic, and popular descriptions of the island’s population. In 1899, a year after Puerto Rico came under U.S. dominion, the census reported that 62 percent of the population was white; by the year 2000, according to official census results, the white proportion of the Puerto Rican population reached 80 percent. Observers of Puerto Rican society have speculated about the sources of this trend, which is typically cited as evidence of the hold of “whitening ideology” on the island. To date, however, none of the hypothesized mechanisms of whitening have been subjected to empirical test. Using newly available public use samples of the 1910 and 1920 censuses of Puerto Rico, this paper explores three possible explanations for the growth in the white population according to official statistics: (1) demographic processes, (2) institutional bias of the Census Office, and (3) socio-cultural shifts in societal conceptions of race. We find little support for the first two hypotheses. The proportion of whites in the Puerto Rican population in 1920 is at least ten percent higher than would be expected due to natural rates of population growth. And it appears, somewhat surprisingly, that any institutional bias of the Puerto Rican Census Office worked to mitigate the magnitude of whitening in this period rather than contributing to it. We find that the statistical whitening of Puerto Rico between 1910 and 1920 is primarily due to changes in the social definition of whiteness. The children of interracial unions, in particular, were much more likely to be classified as white in 1920 than in 1910.